I wouldn’t advocate for income assistance to be increased to make it easier for people to stay on income support, but in the cases of need and cases where we want people to work their way off the system I think that increasing the earned income threshold would be a positive move towards getting people off of income support.
My third question is on the seniors’ home heating subsidy. My issue is a little bit different. It’s more of asking the department to review the adult children supporting aged and disabled family members, whether they be grandparents or parents. Right now the alternative is to move some of these elders into a home, because some of them are getting to a stage where they’re starting to forget things and not really safe to leave them alone to cook for themselves and fend for themselves. Generally day-to-day operations many widows and widowers are running households by themselves at this point. They are homeowners and they have adult children living with them. They are providing some support and so on. What I’m asking the department to do is look at the positives of that type of thing; the money that the government saves overall.
Putting someone in Woodland Manor in Hay River is a very substantial cost to this government. Although it’s to another department, it’s a very substantial cost to the government as a whole. However, having adult children living with the aged is a cost savings to the government because that person’s needs are taken care of by that adult child. However, because their income is taken into consideration, the children don’t want to stay at home and take care of their parents because their parents are going, well, if you’re here, in cases where they have to be anyway, they’ve got no choice, they lose their seniors’ home heating subsidy. My question is: would the government do some sort of feasibility assessment, or whatever we want to call it, an evaluation of actually exempting incomes of adult children that live with the aged in supporting them through their day-to-day life and see if that would be a possibility? We have many situations like that where had it not been for those adult children, many of those elders would be in homes. Very expensive. A very expensive proposition. And then, of course, I guess their homes would be either unutilized or that adult child would take over the home. But this is something that is saving the government a lot of money but it’s
not as common as it should be, because it’s pretty simple. It’s like a policy and heating fuel is very expensive. It’s very hard for them to afford it. Then the burden is on the adult child to do all these essential things for their parents or grandparents.
In addition to that, they have to then fork out some money to cover the costs of operating the unit, because the government will then claw back or not provide this particular subsidy because of the adult child’s income. Thank you.